This invention relates generally to in-station methods and apparatus for automatically encoding television programs and for acquiring information about the airing of such encoded television programs. This information may then be combined with information from other databases and reports may be compiled for use by broadcast stations, advertisers and advertising agencies.
The normal practice for monitoring and verifying the transmission of television programs, such as commercials, has been to video record a set of broadcast stations in each market and then manually to review and record the information from the video tapes for program or commercial occurrences. The information is then manually loaded into a computer data base manager for compilation into various reports for the broadcast station. Such auditing is very time consuming, laborious and expensive, so that only the larger markets are monitored full time, with smaller markets being monitored only one week of each month. Sample auditing of this type is unreliable for a number of reasons, including the fact that it is not always easy to identify a particular commercial uniquely or to differentiate it from a similar ones.
Furthermore, because the auditing is not automated, there is a considerable delay in reporting the information back to the broadcast stations and advertisers.
The television picture in the NTSC system used in the United States consists of a series of frames, each having 520 video scan lines. Each frame consists of two visually interlaced temporarily sequential fields of 260 scan lines each. Each field begins with a vertical sync pulse which is followed by 260 horizontal sync pulses that define the beginning of each video scan line of the field. The horizontal sync pulse for each line starting with line 10 is immediately followed by a 3.6 megahertz color burst signal which in turn is followed by a "black level" voltage level referred to as the "back porch." Starting with scan line 22, video information for the particular scan line follows the back porch. Lines 10 through 20 are referred to as the vertical blanking interval and are not used for television picture information. They may be used, if desired, by the television broadcast station for its purposes. Line 21 is used for closed captions. In most television receivers, lines 10 through about 30 are not visible to the viewer and are referred to as the "overscan region."
Various schemes have been proposed for automatically monitoring the airing of television programs, such as but not limited to commercials. According to some of these schemes, an identification code is recorded on one or more scan lines of the programs to be monitored in the overscan region. U.S. Pat. No. 4,805,020 to Greenberg describes one such system in which each field of the program is encoded with an identifying code by an encoding location before or at the time the tape is duplicated for distribution to broadcast stations in various markets. Remote monitoring systems in each market monitor a plurality of channels being transmitted and detect the encoded programs in order to assemble data on the time, duration, channel and quality of transmission of the program for use in preparing reports.
According to another such scheme, a pattern recognition system monitors the video signal or display of the program being broadcast and seeks to match the program with electronically stored program signals. These systems require large computer systems and are not reliable or accurate enough for fully automatic use.
The above automatic systems have not found wide commercial acceptance, for a number of reasons. For systems monitoring cable transmission, if the local cable goes down the entire monitoring system becomes inoperative. For systems monitoring broadcast signals, it is frequently difficult to find a location suitable for monitoring all stations in the area. Frequently it may be difficult to receive the signals of one or more broadcast station at a given location. Furthermore, it is necessary to go to every program originator to encode the programs to be monitored by the system. Since, for instance, there are a very large number of program originators for commercials, this becomes very cumbersome. There are often several handling steps between the encoding of the program and its ultimate broadcast or cable transmission by a television station. It is therefore difficult to ensure that the identification code will not be stripped out, written over, or otherwise made unusable. Furthermore, since the amount of information available to such a monitoring and verification system is limited, the reports that the system is able to generate are useful to only a limited number of potential customers.
There has been a long-felt need for a reliable, automated, quick and total accumulation of broadcast program and commercial occurrence information, which would serve the ends of a wide group of users, including broadcast stations, advertisers and others.